Political Management Student Doris Mah Leads National Push Against Anti-Asian Racism

In April, a friend of Doris Mah’s, a Carleton University Master of Political Management student, was shopping at a Safeway in North Burnaby, B.C. when she had a frightening experience with a man in the store aisle.

“He all of a sudden started this football posture, like he was hunching and running towards me, like he was trying to tackle me,” Mah’s friend Katharina Huang told CTV News. Huang dodged the man’s tackle and alerted store management, also filing a report with local police.

“This is five blocks away from my house where I normally shop on a weekly basis, and that’s when I realized this is really burning close to home,” says Mah, who immigrated to Canada as a teenager from Hong Kong.

“This woman could have been me, it could have been my daughters, it could have been my mom.”

Instances of anti-Asian racism have accelerated during the COVID-19 pandemic: Burnaby RCMP reports those hate crimes rose by 350 per cent in that city since 2019. Nearby Vancouver was recently labelled the “anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America” after seeing a 717 per cent increase in such incidents.

“I realized it was time to act,” says Mah.

While balancing classes and work with the NDP and New Westminster MP Peter Julian, Mah leveraged decades of experience in politics and community engagement to launch the Stand With Asians Coalition (SWAC) with a goal of uniting grassroots activists across Canada in the fight against anti-Asian hate.

Read full story in the Carleton Newsroom…